Minal Bopaiah

Many sites with a metered paywall have been able to drive traffic through social media. (Poynter recently reported on the different ways six major papers were combining social media and paywalls.) But there’s been some speculation about Facebook’s social readers, which allow users to automatically share their reading and viewing activity with friends, with some rumors that they are “collapsing.”The chart below, compiled and…

As we mentioned in our last post, marketing to niche audiences is a great way for general news pubs to rake in online dollars.But what about the flip side — paywalled aggregators?There haven’t been many to choose from, but a year and a half ago, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co., and Gannett invested $4 million each in Ongo, an online news aggregator with a paywall.But Ongo had a confusing subscription offering,…

In the old days, newspapers and magazines knew that the more editorial breadth they had, the more readers they could seduce. Joe may read the section on cars, but Mary likes the lifestyle section. And Sanjay wants to know what’s happening abroad.But that’s no longer true for our digital world. Online, the more niche-appeal a site has, the more readers and the more likely they are to elicit paying subscribers.Education Week, a national B2B publication,…